The Swirling Abyss... or Why I Study All this Weird Stuff

For a while now, I have maintained that we need to revise our ideas of what reality is. When we look at paranormal phenomena, people tend to have this limited view, this either / or dichotomy. If someone sees a UFO, or a few people have a UFO experience, the assumption is that it’s either a physical craft, or a hoax or hallucination. This view gets us nowhere. We assume that we need to distinguish between internal and external. With many of these phenomena, the answer may involve both. Our culture assumes that anything that takes place in an internal reality is ‘unreal’. An hallucination. If someone has an experience where they have something profound happen to them, it isn’t ‘real’ unless there is physical proof.

The first problem here, is that everything we experience is internal. We have no external experience. We trust what our senses tell us about the environment we are in. Anyone who studies perception will be quick to tell you, we sense very little, and much of it is made up by our brain filling in gaps. The more you study how the brain does this, the more you understand how little we really can tell from our senses. That includes any instruments that we invent to measure our environment, since those are also interpreted through our rather imperfect senses.

Then we have the studies that show that our brains actually can react to things BEFORE they sense them. This brings in the question of time, and what it really is. Clearly, an argument can be made here for pre-cognition, but I think this is more how we interact with reality than anything specific to what we think of as the future. Information may travel in all directions, or what seem like directions, if all of time happens at once. We move through it as we do, because we need to, to have free will, if we have free will, and to accumulate experience. From outside our senses, time may be all one thing, information, that I just there, and we choose how to move through it. So interacting in ways that seem out of sync with time, may not be so strange, just how we interact. Someone who is ‘Psychic’ may have just picked up how to read this information outside of our current location. Jane Robert’s Seth once said something to the effect that time is just what your brain can process at any one moment. Time flies when you are busy, and slows to a crawl when you are bored. In the latter, there is less to process so the sense of time slows. Of course, it’s all subjective, but my point is, everything is just subjective in the end.

We can’t examine our reality from the outside. We can’t examine our consciousness from the outside, either. Everything we know is likely wrong to some degree, we can only refine what we understand from within the system. If you were a character in a computer game, it would be inconceivable to understand what the outside of the computer was like. You only would know what was in your reality, and you wouldn’t understand the confines of that, either. That is where we are. Our materialistic view of things allows extra-terrestrials. So when someone reports a UFO, it’s either ET or bunk. When you get into some of the stranger experiences, and the other experiences that connect with sightings and such, it makes no real sense as simply an ET encounter. Our reality framework, however, fails us. Quantum physics suggest some interplay of consciousness with the basic building blocks of matter. This has of course been used to explain so many things, and usually without a full understanding of the current science.

What we have is us. We have our conscious place in this reality. We look through cloudy eyes, and hear through muddled ears, but we stumble along ok. Our brain’s software has pretty good error correction on it, so we think it’s all continuous and seamless. We don’t know about what it doesn’t tell us about. These experience we call paranormal, may just be what the brain tries to filter out, but sometimes fails. It may then have to build a framework to explain it. Something unrecognized in the road that it didn’t filter… Monster. There, taken care of. Well at least for the brain’s part. We may share some connections and interpretations, or there may be feedback, so when everyone in the car sees it, it’s because someone’s brain edited the information to make it a monster. Maybe it’s a dangerous spot in what we call reality that we should avoid. It doesn’t know how to manifest that to you, so… Monster!

When we take hallucinogens, or trance out driving down the road, or slip into an unusual altered state while sleeping… Aliens. Or Fairies. Or whatever. We encounter another intelligence, normally invisible to us, and our brain has to make sense of it for us. Today, it’s often Grey aliens, especially where they are part of the pop culture. We can deal with that. Aliens fit our reality model. They are external. The reason the question on all this is still open is not due to whether these experiences are real or not, but due to the fact that we don’t have an nearly accurate enough model of reality. Once we have an encounter, our brain has a framework to work with, maybe it then can remember glimpses of encounters it previously was able to filter out, and the next time this intelligence is encountered, the brain doesn’t feel that need to filter it out, because it now has some framework to present it to you. As long as you don’t question the framework, you can be very sure about what you are experiencing, even if not everyone believes you. Your information feeds back to them, to reality, to others, and now we have greys abducting people. It may barely resemble what is actually occurring, but we need everything to be nested in what makes us feel most safe about reality. The experience may scare us, but not as much as how alien what is really occurring is. It may not be as scary as realizing how little we know about ourselves and where we seem to exist. These are the realms of madness, and some monster in the woods, some ghostly spirit, or aliens coming to probe us, are far preferable to the abyss that lies below our certainty.

We are what we are. We are limited for a reason. It doesn’t mean we can’t expand our perceptions, our reality. I study and explore these things for this very reason. I want to know more, I am curious, an explorer. If UFO’s were just ET’s visiting us, well, that would be rather disappointing at this point. It is what it is, but as far as I can see, that is just the current camouflage. These phenomena may tell us far more about who we are and what reality truly is that any ET could. They may all manifest from us, for all we know, and even that, tells us so much about us and reality. I think the majority of people out there want to cling to that safe belief system. Whether It be that of the debunker who just won’t believe any of it no matter what the evidence, or the people who accept something strange is happening, but have created what you may call expanded reality blankets to cover it. Yes, it’s strange and scary, but they’re just from another planet, or they are lost souls, or demons from hell, or an undiscovered ape. If we can label them, give it a structure that fits into our beliefs, we are safe, even if scared of that illusion. The thing we truly fear, is that chaos, that insanity around us that we can’t perceive at all directly, but we gets hints at being there. We can’t understand it, not yet anyways, and it’s so big and overwhelming, that again, it is madness to us. We are not as fragile as we fear, but our beliefs of how things are, can be.